Slashdot Mirror
The Godfather of Sudoku
circletimessquare writes "The New York Times profiles 55 year old Maki Kaji who runs Nikoli, in its article Inside Japan's Puzzle Palace. Nikoli is a puzzle publisher that prides itself on 'a kind of democratization of puzzle invention. The company itself does not actually create many new puzzles — an American invented an earlier version of sudoku, for example. Instead, Nikoli provides a forum for testing and perfecting them.' Also notable is how Mr. Kaji describes how he did not get the trademark for Sudoku in the United States before it was too late. But reminiscent of a theme many Slashdotters will find familiar about intellectual property: 'In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku's intellectual property rights let the game's popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says.' Will Nikoli be the source of the next big puzzle fad after Sudoku?"
The pointless puzzle.
Well, he does make a puzzle I can't refuse...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Nikolai makes my favorite type of puzzles, Nurikabe. Hopefully those will pick up in the US too.
"Will Nikoli be the source of the next big puzzle fad after Sudoku?"
I dunno, be he found the right place to Slashvertise, if he has it ready. (According to him, he has hundreds ready. I kind of hope he manages to get other logic puzzles popular as well.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
What is ku, and why is he running it as root?
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Rather than solving Sudokus manually, I wonder how many Slashdotters have programmed their own solver, and in what languages?
I tried the example problems on the webpage. I had to use MSPaint, as the interface given does not support "pencil" marks and automatically assume that you are directly building the finished product.
That makes sense, as ratings are based on difficulty for a human to solve.
A difficult Sudoku might involve identifing a complex relationship in order to solve it logically, without guessing. Where as a simple Sudoku might involve only identifing simple logical relationships, but may have numerous possibilities that would increase the time of a brute force technique.
The following is a Binary Sudoku with a "difficult" rating:
.|.
1|.
-+-
Good Luck!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The article only mentions Nikoli's book-related site, which is limited to quick introductions to a few of the puzzle types and a way to order their books. The books are beautiful, with top-notch puzzles printed on high-quality paper, but the international shipping rates make it a somewhat expensive leap of faith for someone new to these puzzles.
A better choice is Nikoli's online puzzle site, which is linked from their site mentioned above, but it might be easy to miss as it's not featured very well in that uncharacteristically ugly site design. There they publish 3-4 puzzles per day out of 7 different types, sizes, and varying levels of difficulty, for a monthly subscription of around $4. Nonsubscribers can play a few of each type to try out the solving interfaces, which use Flash and are far better than the ones in the NYT article. They support pencil markings, "try" modes, unlimited undo steps, partial checking, etc. What's not obvious from the nonsubscriber page is that it saves your solving histories and times for each puzzle, and you can see how you stack up to all the other subscribers. Also, you can replay your solve (with speedup/step options) to watch how you did it, or more interestingly, watch how other people did it, to expand your arsenal of techniques. You can write comments for each puzzle and read through others', but unfortunately for me most comments are in Japanese, I'm hoping the gaijin population there continues to grow..
The variety of constructing styles and solving methods possible in puzzles like Slitherlink, Nurikabe, and Heyawake is far greater than in Sudoku, where it's often impossible to discern whether a puzzle was human-generated (i.e. Nikoli) or computer-generated (i.e. almost everything in newspapers and those bookshelves stuffed with books crapped out by every publisher trying to cash in). So for those who may have tired of relatively repetitive Sudoku solving, I recommend giving these other more elegant and interesting puzzle types a spin.
I'm not affiliated with Nikoli, just an addicted subscriber for several years, and purchaser of many of their books. Trying to spread the word, as on one hand I'm happy to see logic puzzles like Sudoku increasing in popularity, but on the other hand I worry about high-quality puzzles getting buried by all the cash-in crud..
Prolog has got to be the way forward here. With the Eclipse constraint libraries I programmed a solver in about 10 lines. All I had to do was specify the constraints on rows (all_different and sum_to(45)) columns and squares.
My solver uses a simple XML format, so that it could easily grow elements for any future features, without obsoleting older sudoku collections. But I think I prefer doing the pen-and-paper format of daily papers.
Howard Garns did, he published in magazines, it was called Number puzzle. The earliest found copies are 1976, almost 9 years BEFORE nikoli even published a "sudoku puzzle"
The difference between number puzzle and sudoku is.... the name, it's 100 percent the same, same rules, same game.
It's doubtful that "kakuro" is even Nikoli's either, that was another invention first found in american culture in the same magazines as number puzzle. That was called Cross Sums.
But then again why am I expecting a massive news publication like the New York Times to do a little research about these topics before announcing them. It's not like they are nationally read.
Sudoku was fun, but the majority of the fun with any of these puzzles for me was figuring out solution methods for myself. Sudoku is now so heavily documented as to be trivial to solve, even at the highest difficulty levels (Especially if you have the patience to try Bowman's Bingo).
After getting burned out on Sudoku, I found out about Nikoli, and the other myriad puzzles they publish. At first I started with Hashiwokakero, then quickly moved on to Heyawake, Nurikabe, Hitori, Akari, Ripple Effect, Masyu, and even some not listed on the English version of Nikoli's website (Kin Kon Kan is particularly fun, once you figure out the rules).
In that time, I've ordered several books from Nikoli's website, traded for books with occasional Japanese acquaintances, and hunted Japanese auction sites for out of print editions. In short, it's expensive and time consuming to feed my language-independent logic puzzle habit. I'd be very happy if some stateside publisher would put out a magazine akin to Nikoli's "Puzzle Communication", or a compilation of new puzzles. I've seen a few books featuring other Nikoli puzzle types, but they do not feature more than 3 or 4 different puzzle types. Games magazine's puzzle magazines frequently feature Nurikabe and Slither Link, but only 2-5 puzzles per issue. What I want is variety and volume. Lots of different puzzles, lots of instances of each.
By the way, those with the ability/desire to import Japanese video games might want to check out Puzzle Series for the Nintendo DS. Volume 5 is Slither Link, Volume 6 is Illust Logic (Known to many as Picross, Nonograms, Edel, or Paint by Numbers), Volume 10 is Hitori, Volume 11 is Nurikabe, and Volume 12 is Akari (Light Up). You may also want to check out Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection. NetGame is particularly interesting.
And of course, no discussion of grid-based, wordless logic puzzles is complete without a mention of Solitaire Battleships, which currently cruises under the radar with the name Yubotu.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.